It's good that CASP8 will release an "official" automatic evaluation. There areserveral reasons that the server section should play a more important rolethan the human section this time (or at least should be paid more attention to than previous CASPs). First, there are more registered server groups than the human groups for the first time in CASP8 (121 vs. 112); second, there are more server targets than the human ones this time; third, to some extent, the results of automated server predictions reflect more objectively the advance of the algorithms than the human-intervened results; fourth, maybe most importantly, only the advancement of the automated predictions (ratherthan the human-expert predictions) could be exploited by the biology community (through on-line servers or software release), which has been THE goal of the CASP experiments.

Cannot agree more. Do we really need a human section in CASP9 if it turns out to be dominated by ranking/selecting server models or by reading related mutagenesis papers? Combining and refiningserver models to generate better ones may be one valued pointfor human section. But it can also be done through server sectionand the result is to me more trustable.

It will be provided with the results of numerical forecasting evaluations performed at the Prediction Center, and will evaluate the results primarily on that basis. They will be asked to focus especially on the strength of different methods.